Boomerang

After spending a number of years OOM (Outside Of Microsoft) I was seduced by the promise of working on a profiler. Since I occasionally feel the need for speed, I couldn’t resist and returned to Microsoft in the fall of 2003. I was a debugger developer during a good part of my initial stint at Microsoft, so this seemed like a good fit. At some later date I may blog about why the challenges of writing profilers and debuggers are more different that one might assume.

We’ve just shipped Beta 2 of Visual Studio Team Systems so it’s public now and I can start talking about how to use the thing. We’ve done a lot of work to get an easily usable, “press the button and go” type of experience for the average developer or performance engineer working in our core scenarios. (Take a look at IanHu’s blog for some good walkthroughs). But like the debugger, when you really need a profiler, you really need a profiler. If you happen to be off the beaten track enough that our user friendly ‘easy’ solution doesn’t work, you still need to grab that data and find out why you app is running so dang slow. You won’t take no for an answer (at least I wouldn’t). For those of you that find yourself in these situations we’re planning a series of “Off-Road” posts. John Cunningham has posted the first of this series and I’m busily working on one of these little gems myself.

So stay tuned for some off-road profiling and other fast and fun GrayCode.